To those whose lives flicker like a candle in the wind elves are royal and in their societies live free of want.

I spent thirteen years growing bonsai, fifteen pining over Loravindrel. That brought me into my eight year long emo-goth period which produced poetry I’ve since fed to the flames. For sixteen seasons after that I meditaed under a plum tree and swept the eight hundred and seventy two dozen and five stars. Six years I practiced the letter œ to master the uhm. Fifty seven years I spent in the arms of Madeleine and our oldest grandchild is about your age. And the last three seasons I’ve been chasing the south-western gale that robbed her from me decades too early.

Apocalypse World, the system that spawned the PbtAs, have a pronciple for the GM

Play to find out

For me that is the guiding light. I play to find out. There is no plot, no story. Only the situation the game finds itself in. I dont know where it will go. But I do know where it starts and who is involved.

As for managing the chaos I use two tools. First is only call for a roll when it really, really matters. When there are consequences. Second is something that can have fallen out of favor in more recent PbtAs and that 8s clearly defined Threats along with the moves they take and a few clocks/fronts. That way when I need to Play to find out I have tools to keep it contained. Which also ties into only testing when it matters because there are a threat or two involved.

Or put in another way: Read and absorb Apocalypse World.

I started looking at OSR campaigns/scenarios after getting annoyed yet another time with far too verbose settings and constrained scene-to-scene flows. And how boy are they refreshing. Think they may be right up your alley.

Woodfall is one I recently got through a Kickstarter and been loving reading it. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/258469/woodfall

Completely agree with you. Being disruptive is always a player choice, everything the character does is always a player choice.

I’m one of those. Especially if my character got something wrong and is acting on those assumptions. By the gods I love digging my own grave!

A favourite of mine “I’ll put on some more tea while you settle on a plan”

I tend to take one or two approaches. First being “Slowest and Loudest” in that the one worst at the test makes the roll, most of the time with help. Possibly also backed by a setup action.

Second is turning it into an extended test, I’ll put up a tracker and we’ll see what actions the narrative drags up. With this option a failure is only Stealth Over if it has to be, when there is no other reasonable consequence. So clanker can clank.